We are Cole and Jamie Boling. We are a husband-and-wife Real Estate team at Keller Williams Realty One Legacy Partners in Topeka Kansas. We service the Northeast Kansas area with Real Estate, including Residential, Investors, and Commercial Real Estate. You Name It, We have the ability to service you. Today, we wanted to come out and talk to you a little bit about working with us if you were a first-time home buyer. We’re seeing a lot of need for education and understanding of the real estate market when you are a first time home buyer. Because, like us, we bought our first home at one point. Most people will eventually buy their first home and the very first thing most of them say is, where in the world do we start? Well, we’re going to talk with you about that process and how we at the Boling group devote our time to helping our clients understand the process. Really an education based process.
Jamie can you tell me a little bit about what an education base that we do for our first time home buyers would look like?
Yeah, so what we do is give you an overview of what the process will look like from start to finish, so at the beginning you kind of have an idea of what to expect coming up . Then all the way throughout that process we are telling you where we’re at. You will know what you need to be doing at all times. Then there may be a point where you don’t need to be doing anything, so I mean basically it’s just we’re there with you every step of the way. We’re not leaving you stranded, leaving you wondering and saying what’s going on, where are we at? We’re very much, this is where you’re at. This is what we’ll be doing next. Then, once we get here, then we’ll be going to this next. So we keep you informed all along the way and we educate you. We also help you with contract verbiage, like how to understand how it really works throughout the entire process.
To kind of piggyback on what she says is when we meet, we like to meet in person, we sit down with you and we go over the contract. We go over what an inspection looks like, what it really means to have an inspection, what does an inspection aggregate really mean. We really help understand what different terminologies of our contract are. That we have seen time and time again.
What kind of inspections you should not skip out on. Which ones, if you didn’t want to do it, you could simply potentially save money now and just save up for it later. Those kind of things help you understand how it all really works.
Another key piece to this whole thing is our background. My background is around new construction & Home Building remodeling. My father is a home builder. He owns Mark Boling Construction which is one of the top Premier Builders in the Topeka Kansas area. Voted Best of Topeka Home Builder for multiple years. He has taught us through all of our years of doing this, what’s to really look for in the understanding of home. With our over twenty years of experience between the two of us alone, we can look at a property with you and tell you if you’re going to be getting in over your head. If you’re going to be purchasing a good home. If it’s going to be a great resale. We talked about resale too. So because we do have a knowledge of the foundation, the bones as a lot of people like to call it, of a home. We really can help a first-time home buyer feel secure and understanding of a home.
Also, to really know what you are looking for in home. You’re not just looking at the paint color, you’re looking at more than just the finishes.
Which also leads us to our database right, so when you work with us you work with our people right, it’s not just oh Cole and Jamie are all our Realtors, you know we’re your partner. It’s essential that you hire an agent who has a whole group of people, plumbers, electricians, you know concrete people, roofers, painters, anything that you need, we have it. We call it, we have a guy/gal. You know we look at it as, we’ve got a guy for that or we’ve got to gal for that. We do laugh about it because it’s a lot of fun, and the truth of the matter is, we really do, between our database and my father’s database with his trade partners, we have those people that you don’t have to go out and try to figure out. So you become a part of it. We do that for you, we want to make sure everything goes well for you as well.
And also, follow up with you about how your experience went. We want to make sure that you get the best experience.
Now, let’s talk a little bit about Lending, money! What’s really interesting is that a lot of first time home buyers that we see have no idea what a credit score really means. They have no idea what getting lending means. Getting a loan. How that looks. How much money do I have to put down? What loan programs can I really get? They don’t even know there’s different types really. Is there Bond Money? What is Bond money? All of these things, we can address on a level of simple understanding. We look at it on a case by case basis. We look at your needs and figure out who would be the best fit for you. I’ll look at it like this, I want everybody to understand what it means from the beginning, you know, I look at it from if I have to explain this to my seven-year-old, I want him to understand right and I can tell you, as Jamie will attest, we have so much knowledge that sometimes there’s a lot of information. So together, we’re really good at bringing it home and bringing it very centered to your needs and helping you understand in the most simple, as they would call a layman’s terms. So,that is a huge advantage to working with us. If you are a first time home buyer.
Ask questions, dont think any question is stupid, we want you to understand, so ask questions! Most of the time, the questions that we are asked from first time home buyers are probably the best questions that a lot of people forget to ask when they buy again or for the third time. They’re probably one of the most important questions, whatever that may be.
A couple other things that we have in our process is we call our clients, kind of part of our family, we do things a little bit differently. We have a lot of clients that will attest that we have some fun!
And what do I mean by we have some fun Jamie?
Well, you know, we like to be Ellen sometimes. We like to do some giveaways. We like to do client events. However, We like to keep in touch, i mean when you buy a house, everyone wants to have their own personal touch on it. So, we always want to come back and see it. It might take us a little bit to get back to you, we do still want to come to your house. Yeah, we love to be a part of your life. We love for you to join us a couple times a year. A prime example, we rented out an entire movie theatre to show boss baby 2 recently and it was free to our clients and we paid for it. We had sponsors help out as well! We coordinate that and we do that regularly. So you don’t just hire us to help sell a house, you hired us to be part of something bigger ,to be part of a community, and to understand that you have a phone call that will get you an answer. That way you are not having to search for it through unreliable sources. So, with all of that out there, we would love to be your REALTORS®
We would love to help you by buying a home! We will take our time, we don’t care what you buy, we want you to be happy and we want you to feel good about your purchase.
The other thing we love to tell people is, we don’t care what your budget is. We would much rather you be comfortable with whatever financial situation you are in. We want you to be comfortable, as some people get approved for this amount but they don’t want to spend that much monthly. We don’t care if you only want to spend you know x amount, we don’t care it’s all about making you happy and us finding what you guys need and want.
You hit the nail on the head there, so just remember that whenever you’re looking for an agent some people are very pushy about going to the top and pushing you to your limit. We are not like that.
Which is funny because that was the last thing I wrote. We put the client’s interests above our own.
One thing that we do get a lot of is how do we get paid? So as a first-time home buyer I want you to understand that 95% of the time, the seller pays us to represent you. So in a sense, we’re representing you for a little to no money. That is how we get paid, when you close the home. Closing the home means, showing up to sign those documents, handing over the final check, getting the keys, right. So when you do that that’s when we make money.
Which brings me to another point, that’s for sale by owner. If you are a first time home buyer, you want to go to your agent before you go to the first time home buyer because we need to have that conversation with them as a seller in order to negotiate with them paying that commission rather than you guys paying that commission. So it is very important that you go to your agent, us, to negotiate that for you.
Yes, because you don’t know, what you don’t know, until you know, what you don’t know! And, it’s typically the other side of the transaction. You don’t know what that for sale by owner actually knows about this process and what they’re taking you for. That’s where we protect you. We are here to protect you and make sure you are taking care of us all the way through.
So hire us, obviously, but more importantly when you are looking for an agent, find somebody who cares about you. Someone who cares about educating you and is willing to take time for you. Also, make you part of their world afterwards. Once a transaction is done with us, we’re still here. We’re gonna make sure you know that too.
Once again, thank you for tuning in today, and once again, I’m Cole and Jamie Boling with the Boling Group with Keller Williams One Legacy Partners in Topeka.